Managing Social Media Analytics in Local Government
Part of the Critchsue blog series – Managing Social Media in Local Government
Within your organisation what is the value of your social media analytics on a scale of 1 (completely useless /non-existent) to 10 (totally useful/informative)?
To determine where your organisation currently sits on the useless/non-existent, useful/informative spectrum, it is suggested you run a simple survey within your organisation, asking recipients of your social media analytics reporting to rate this using the scale mentioned and also advise (Y/N) whether they think social media analytics would be valuable to the organisation at all.
In my opinion, within many local government organisations, the result of this survey would be:
Current Value Score: 3 or less (not very useful or relevant)
Is Valuable: N (No)
The reason for this result would be that, in many cases, social media has been implemented because the organisation thinks that is what the public expect, rather than as a valuable business tool. This perception needs to be changed.
Achieve this by starting your analytics makeover today
Social media analytics is more than just departmental number crunching. It is about gathering and analysing data from a variety of social media sources to enable business decisions. As such, social media analytics needs to start with a strategy that encompasses the whole business, not just an isolated social strategy.
Build a social media measurement strategy.
Implement an analytics process that will show off your strategy
Social Media Measurement Strategy
The Altimeter Social Media Measurement Framework (Etlinger & Li, 2011) provides a base on which a good social media analytics strategy can be built. The four critical steps of this framework are:
- Strategy – Start with your business objectives and the strategies that support these objectives. The reality in the changing social media landscape is that planning is for the present (with the future in mind) and must be sufficiently adaptable to serve the future
- Metrics – Define how you will measure success from a business perspective before approaching the social perspective
- Organisation – Evaluate how ready the organisation is in term of resources (staff, systems, tools) and internal collaboration. Reporting on areas the organisation is not ready for will have an adverse effect
- Technology – Using the other three steps as input, select the tool that is most appropriate for your organisation bearing in mind the how you intend to measure success and the resources you have available to you.
Now you have completed the pre-requisites, let’s start measuring
Analytic Process
Implementing an enduring, repeatable process for social media analytics is very important. It needs to take into consideration the constantly evolving environment. Using the capture, understand, present (CUP) process (Fan & Gordon, 2014) social analytics process will ensure flexibility while providing structure and best practice for this area.
Capture analytics from a wide variety of sources. Don’t limit yourself to your immediate environment. However, you do need to strike a balance between the need to find all potential information and the need to focus on the most relevant and authoritative sources (Fan & Gordon, 2014) so that you don’t drown in the quantity of information captured.
Understand the data you have captured. This stage is the core of the analytics process where the meaning of the information must be assessed and metrics for useful decision making generated (Fan & Gordon, 2014).
Present the information in a format that is easily understood by the recipients. Use some of the widely available visualisation techniques and tools (Fan & Gordon, 2014). Sophisticated visual analytics help make sense of large amounts of information (Fan & Gordon, 2014).
Congratulations!!
Your analytics value score should now be increasing rapidly and the benefits of this increase (better perception of social media, wider understanding of social media in business, etc) will be becoming evident.
Keep improving and the benefits will continue to reveal themselves.
Other blogs in Critchsue – “Managing Social Media in Local Government” series
Social Media Privacy and the Digital Native
Social Media Fire and Storm Prevention, Preparation and Response
Social Media Risk Management – Is it needed?
References
Etlinger, S., & Li, C. (2011, Aug). A Framework for Social Analytics. Retrieved Jan 2016, from http://faculty.darden.virginia.edu/GBUS8630/doc/altimetersocialanalytics081011final-110810105257-phpapp01.pdf
Fan, W., & Gordon, M. (2014). The Power of Social Media Analytics. Communications of the ACM, 57(6), 74-81.
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